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Poster for Mad City
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Released
1997 · FILM

Mad City

A disgraced museum guard desperate to reclaim his job stages a hostage crisis, only to become a pawn in a cut‑throat live‑TV spectacle where his every move could cost lives and his sanity.

One man will make a mistake. The other will make it a spectacle.

Directed by
Runtime
114 min
CrimeDramaThriller

Synopsis

A museum guard, who becomes misguided after losing his job and attempts to regain it by holding people at gunpoint, is thrust into the chaotic and ratings-obsessed world of television.

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How many hands made this film

The scale of the collaboration

Principal cast & crew: 22

These are the principals we have on file — the full crew ran to the hundreds. Every film this size was made by far more hands than any credits list ever names.

Why a floor?

This is a minimum, not a total. We only count the credits we’ve captured so far, and coverage is uneven — a blockbuster might show a few hundred names while another of the same size shows a couple dozen. The real crews all ran into the thousands. The number here only grows as full credits are enriched — so we frame it as a floor, never a headcount.

Craft leads on file

Edited by Francoise BonnotShot by Patrick BlossierScored by Thomas NewmanDesigned by Catherine Hardwicke

Box Office

1997 · Box office

📉 Underperformed — grossed 0.2× its budget

Why 2.5×?

Cinemas keep roughly half of every ticket sold, and a wide release’s marketing often costs about as much again as the film — so a movie needs to gross around 2.5× its production budget just to break even theatrically. It’s a rule of thumb, not the studio’s ledger (home video and streaming come later).

Worldwide gross

$10.5M

Budget$50.0M
Worldwide gross$10.5M
break-even (2.5×)

Opening weekend: $4.6M 44% of its US run. Front-loaded — most of its money arrived opening weekend.

Opening week (7-day): $6.3M60% of its US & Canada run.

Peak 2,194 theaters

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